They had come to set up a spirit tablet for me.
In the afternoon shade stood two companies of people. He Song led one — the people of the Returning Society, carrying a newly cut stone tablet covered with red cloth, its carving hidden. The other company was from the village school, standing at the far end of the tablet; at their head was the school's new master, whose surname I no longer remember. I kept names for a few hundred years, and then I stopped and kept only voices. When the master spoke, his voice smelled of ink.
"Elder," he said, "you are turning a tree into a temple. The tree is alive. Do you think you can press it dead under a stone?"
He Song did not take offense. That is the worst and the best thing about him: he is too reasonable. He patted the tablet the way you pat a horse.
"I am not worshiping it," he said. "I am giving it its rightful name. The star-fade comes nearer every year, and the hearts in this village grow more uneasy every year. People need a place to kneel and put the fear down. Da Qing has stood here for thousands of years. It can bear this tablet."
"It can bear it," said the master. "Did you ask whether it wanted it?"
"Trees do not speak," He Song said. "Which is exactly why people must speak for them. All these years, people have. Your school spoke for it once — those before planted, those after rest. Now we speak for it — the lights-out is a door opening. It is the same."
That was what they were fighting over: whether the lights-out was a door opening or a door closing. He Song said the star-fade was the door of the cycle opening; when the end came, people would not die, they would walk back to the places they came from; the door was under Da Qing; and a tablet was a lamp left burning for the living. The school said lights-out was lights-out; the stars had been dying for four hundred years; and He Song was preaching death as a door so that people would treat a coffin as a bed, sleep easy, and fear death a little less — which was not wrong, they conceded, only do not worship the fear.
I listened. Down the centuries such gatherings have been held many times. In the age of the cloths, they argued over whether red cloth should be hung on me. In the age of the niche, they argued over whether I should have a clay image. Always it was people standing under me, arguing over what I am. They argue very seriously. They do not know that none of the things they argue about are of any use to me. I hear only true words — and in an argument, people say nothing but true words. He Song truly fears the scattering of hearts. The master truly fears the worship of fear. Both sentences are true. True sentences collide, and neither gives way.
I have presided over a hundred such gatherings and profited from none of them. They come to settle what I am, and they always leave having settled what they are instead. It has been so for as long as there have been gatherings, and I have stopped minding; a tree that minded would have died of it in its first century. I listen because it is the only thing I can do, and because — though none of them know it — a tree that hears both sides without taking one is the only peace a village ever gets.
When argument failed him, He Song used his last move. He pulled the red cloth off the tablet. There were characters on it — I cannot read, but I received their weight. My name, carved into stone. From this day I would no longer be only a tree. I would be the Guardian Spirit of Yinchuan.
He had done what I have seen done countless times. He had nailed a god onto me again.
I did not struggle. I cannot. I have no face, no expression; there is no way to show them I do not want it. Across the centuries what I have learned is to keep wanting and not-wanting both off my face, so that no one feels the need to perform in front of me. But this time there was one person I had not counted on, and she struggled for me.
Xing pushed her way out of the crowd. She said nothing. She was carrying a kite on her back.
The kite was homemade — a bamboo frame, paper stretched over it, something painted on the paper that I could not make out across the crowd. She paid attention to no one. She walked straight to my foot and climbed, the way a small animal climbs. He Song called after her: "Xing! Get down. This is not a game!" She ignored him. She climbed fast. A twelve-year-old climbs a tree the way other people walk, and in a few moments she had reached the old branch where she always stopped — and she did not stop. She went higher, to the highest branch, the one I have never let any child reach.
The schoolmaster tilted his head back and went quiet. He Song tilted his head back too. Everyone below tilted their heads back and watched the small shadow climb, inch by inch, to my very top. The wind was rising. She settled herself on the highest branch, took out the kite, and tied its line to the branch. She tied it firmly. Three knots.
When she had finished, she let her eyes travel down from the kite to the ring of upturned faces below, and she said:
"It's not your door."
The wind carried her voice down to every ear. She pointed at the tablet.
"If you want to worship it, I won't stop you. But I've put my thing up first. If it's a god — a god's tree shouldn't hold a child's things. And if it isn't a god, then you shouldn't be setting up a tablet for it at all."
Then she let go of the kite. A kite with no hand on it should have been torn away by the wind. But her line was tied to the highest branch, and the kite could not fly off; it could only strain in the wind, and the straining pulled the line taut, and the line hummed. She looked up at the kite that could not break free, and suddenly she smiled. And she said — to me, her voice soft, as if she were afraid the people below might hear:
"Da Qing. The kite is yours. Watch it for me. It wants the sky."
Below, there was silence. No one spoke. A paper kite straining in the wind had made a quarrel about doors and gods suddenly look small.
He Song stood in front of the tablet for a long time. Then he bent down and laid the red cloth back over the carving, and he said:
"The tablet. Let us discuss it another day."
He did not take the tablet away. But I knew it would not be raised today. The crowd dispersed. The schoolmaster paused beside He Song as he was leaving, and said, "That child climbs very high." He Song said, "What use is high?" And the master said, "High sees clearly."
They left. I stood alone in the afternoon light, which was beginning to slant, and above my head a kite strained in the wind.
I have watched them make a god of me many times. The cloths. The niche. The cords. The carvings. Every time, people laid something heavy on me and then walked away, and the thing hung on me year after year until it became my old clothing. Every time I knew: a god hears no true words. From the day a thing is set up to be worshiped, no one speaks to it like a thing anymore.
But this time there was one difference.
What they laid on me this time was a kite. And a kite is not an offering. An offering is set down for a god. A kite is a thing straining to get up into the sky. It is tied to my highest branch, straining, humming, wanting to fly away and unwilling to let go of the line. It is the first thing on my body that has ever wanted to leave me — tied to me, and yet not mine.
And suddenly I felt that taut line running from my branch down to the ground — down to the heart of the child who tied three knots and then looked up at me once more.
Between human beings and me, I have never once let down a line of my own. The cloth rots. The cord decays. The carvings are swallowed by the bark. It is always time that lets these things go for me. This is the only line I have not been able to let go.
In all my life, of everything human beings have given me, this is the first thing I cannot bear to see break.
The wind sounded again. The kite strained at my top. And for the first time in three hundred and twenty million years, I felt as though my own branch had grown something that beats.